Resistance and Persistence

In 1881, Hessia Helfman, a young Jewish-born revolutionary, was sentenced to death in Russia for her part in the successful plot to assassinate Czar Alexander II, but her execution was postponed until after she gave birth. She died in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress before she could be executed, and her child died soon thereafter in an orphanage.

A century later, Patricia Roisenblit, a young Jewish-born radical activist in Argentina, was abducted along with her partner by the military junta in 1978 because of their involvement with the subversive Montoneros. Pregnant when she was taken prisoner, she was known to have given birth to a son in captivity, and was then “disappeared,” as was the little boy. Named Rodolfo by his mother, he could have died in obscurity like Hessia Helfman’s child, but his relatives spent two decades looking for him, and the story of their dogged search forms the backbone of Haley Cohen Gilliland’s beautifully written and bracing book.

Leading the charge was Patricia’s mother, Rosa. The daughter of Russian refugees guided to the Argentinian pampas by Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association, she grew up on a farm but had yearned even as a child to leave the countryside behind and study medicine. She was far from alone. “So many children of Jewish immigrants left their families’ farms to study medicine, in fact, that it inspired a local adage: ‘We planted wheat and grew doctors.’” Ultimately, Rosa became an obstetrician in Buenos Aires. That’s the path that her daughter Patricia seemed to be following before she was radicalized, captured, and murdered.

Rosa, in the aftermath of her disappearance, searched not only for her pregnant daughter, whose fate she didn’t initially know, but for the child to whom, as she eventually learned from reliable sources, she had given birth. Her quest led her to others in the same boat, the “Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Gilliland’s account of the valiant efforts of these women to pry the truth loose from the junta when it was still in power, and to recover their kids after its downfall, is awe-inspiring and heart-wrenching. Rosa became one of the leaders of the grandmothers, who were, when necessary, unbelievably courageous, and later, when it wasn’t, were tremendously resourceful (especially in their pioneering use of DNA tests) in tracking down children who had been allocated to regime-friendly couples within Argentina and beyond.

Even their successes were often very belated. When Rosa, her granddaughter, and her daughter’s lover’s mother eventually identified Rodolfo, he was already a twenty-one-year-old man bearing the name Guillermo Gómez, with no inkling of his true background (except, perhaps, for the fact that his abusive “father” had sometimes derided him, inexplicably, as a Jew). Deciding what to make of what he learned and, above all, how to grapple with the adoptive parents he now knew to be criminals, confronted him with an impossible challenge. It’s painful to see him barking angrily at his newly discovered blood relatives for making his life so complicated. Asked years later, however, whether he was sorry that his life had been so disrupted by them, he said that “I wouldn’t change a thing.” “Despite all their ups and downs,” Gilliland tells us, he had come to love Rosa and to revere her as an icon.

In the course of time, Rosa and the other mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared became national icons in Argentina and renowned throughout the world. Soon after he became president of Argentina, in 2003, Néstor Kirchner proclaimed before the General Assembly of the United Nations: “We are the children of the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo.”

Rosa herself retired from the vice presidency of the Abuelas a couple of years ago, at the age of 102. But the group is still in operation and it is distressing to learn at the very end of Gilliland’s book that its surviving members are no longer treated by the Argentinian government as heroines. Javier Milei, the country’s current president, and his vice president have denounced them, along with the members of other human rights groups, as money-grubbing apologists for the terrorism of the Montoneros.